In a speech, Sir Tim Berners-Lee has announced a new the World Wide Web Foundation with a three-part mission:

to advance One Web that is free and open, to expand the Web's capability and robustness, and to extend the Web's benefits to all people on the planet.

He says:

The Web Foundation will bring together business leaders, technology innovators, academia, government, NGOs, and experts in many fields to tackle challenges that, like the Web, are global in scale. The Web Foundation is in the unique position of being able to learn from the results of projects to accelerate the evolution of the Web.

The Foundation will be run by Steve Bratt, who has posted a welcome note. There's also a press release, which says: "The Foundation will raise funds through a multi-faceted strategy, beginning with a $5 million seed grant over five years from the John S and James L Knight Foundation."

BBC News has an interview with TBL, which says: "The Foundation will also look at concerns that the web has become less democratic, and its use influenced too much by large corporations and vested interests." Sir Tim expresses concern about the web's development as a major source of disinformation, saying:

"On the web the thinking of cults can spread very rapidly and suddenly a cult which was 12 people who had some deep personal issues suddenly find a formula which is very believable," he said. "A sort of conspiracy theory of sorts and which you can imagine spreading to thousands of people and being deeply damaging."

But I'm not sure you can do anything about that: it's the nature of the beast. Outside of politics, the only people who actually go around proselytizing for their views are the ones who are clearly wrong: if they were right, they wouldn't bother. Support for so-called "Intelligent design" is an obvious example.